Community Reputation

About sowen222

Profile Information

@DavidHertzberg Good idea - I've submitted the feature request.
...That said, I don't hold much hope out they'll implement it, as I've also repeatedly submitted bug reports over the years - FOR THE SAME BUGS - and although they are confirmed and escalated to engineering, they keep appearing, year after year.

@DavidHertzberg Thanks for your reply, I was intending to update this post.
I had contacted Customer Support, and they suggested a 'thorough rebuild' of the catalogue... I think that option used to be available in previous versions of Retrospect, but now it appears you have to go into the Backup Set folder and delete all the ".session" files, then do a rebuild, at which point Retrospect does the thorough rebuild (instead of the usual quick rebuild). The Retrospect for Windows documentation has not been updated recently, because there the 'fast rebuild' as a check-box (Retrospect v12) is still documented, and there's nothing about deleting the '.session' files to force a thorough rebuild.
In any case, the rebuild detected broken chains in a number of files which had been backed-up in 2017 using block-level incremental, and it corrected the corresponding snapshot entries in the catalogue. After that, the transfer completed successfully.
A bit drastic that Retrospect just dies with 'assertions' and meaningless messages, rather than giving a meaningful description and recovering gracefully, but oh well :-/. Just glad I have my backup set corrected, and for safety's sake, I've turned block-level incremental off (in my case, it wasn't resulting in a huge space saving anyway).

Sigh... it's that time of year again - time to clean up and archive backups - when I face major hassles with Retrospect. What should be relatively straight-forward, always turns into a multi-week drama where I question the reliability of Retrospect backups. Every year it's the same story, just different 'assertions' 😬
I have a backup set which contains weekly backups from the last two years - 2017 and 2018 - and I want to create new set (as a document archive) with only monthly snapshots and a selection of the directories/files from the original backup.
I'm using the latest version of Retrospect Desktop for Windows, version 15.6.1.104. My Windows 10 workstation is completely up to date.
Transferring the selected snapshots goes fine* for most of the snapshots from 2018, then I start getting assertion failures for various snapshots from 2017:
Assertion failure at elem.cpp-1096
LmGet: ndex = 2 > nsp->count = 1
I recreated the catalogue (which completed without error) but I still get the assertions during the snapshot transfer.
If I try to transfer just the problem snapshots to a completely new backup set, I get the same assertions. I've tried different copies of the source backup set (I have one on-site and two off-site), but they result in the same assertions.
I completely un-installed (including deleting the ProgramData\Retrospect directory), and re-installed, but I get the same error.
Any suggestions?
*Note: I write that transferring the selected snapshots goes fine, but even some of the transfers which are successful report missing files - odd, because the files (e.g. a cache file) weren't even in the backup in the first place, and I'm not trying to transfer them anyway. For example:
[!] Exsp::exspBuildPartialFileSessionList: (OnSite) can not find node path "C:\...\GoogleEarth\dbCache1.dat" in session 2017.09.06 12:47:02.789 PM

In the Backup Sets / Properties / Snapshots window, I am unable to select multiple snapshots. This means I have to select one at a time to "Forget", and wait for quite some time for it to finish before I can select the next. I would like to be able to select all the snapshots I wish to forget so that I can groom the set do it all at once, and go away until it finishes. There seems to be no reason why I cannot select multiple entries in the list, just like I can do everywhere else in Retrospect.
Can you please fix this?

@bdjunagan, @John Reed, I can confirm that the checkbox is missing in the Desktop version. I verified this omission with Retrospect Support via email and they have entered it as a bug.
The bug with being unable to connect to the upgrade server is still present, and Support has just ignored it, saying there are currently no updates (I used to get "you are using the latest version", now I get an error... there *is* a difference).

Thanks John, your work-around for SMTP works for me too. A previous version of Retrospect had this problem, as I recall, but it was later fixed. Somehow they re-introduced it in v10.
Of course the "Check for Updates" still fails, but it wouldn't surprise me if it weren't due to a similar problem (e.g. an SSL-negotiated port).

I have experienced no noticeable improvement either. I suspect the improvements are due to better co-ordination of Instant Scan (which I do not use/trust) in combination with multiple clients.
Hopefully there will be a major improvement in copying snapshots which suddenly took 3 times longer with v9.5 than they did with previous versions. So they slow it down prior to releasing the new version, then speed it back up again with the new version and claim speed enhancements. Or am I just being cynical :-P

I've had this happen as well over the years, usually with JPG files. Once you get such an MD5 error, it always reports it with the same file, even if you back it up again (unless you change the file in the meantime, of course).
On two different occasions, Retrospect backed up two different JPG files, reported an MD5 error during the verify so Retrospect assumed they were not backed-up properly and kept trying again the next time, with the same MD5 error as a result. In the end, my work-around both times was to open the file and save it again (thereby changing the content).
Retrospect's MD5 algorithm apparently has a problem with particular binary streams. Either that, or hard-drives are sometimes unable to record a particular binary pattern - odd, but I've heard of it happening.

Just installed v10 (build 213) on Windows 8.1. I changed NO settings/preferences during the upgrade.
- It is unable to send notification emails, error -592 "Invalid response from SMTP server".
- It is also unable to check for updates (reports "cannot connect").
I double-checked the Windows Firewall settings, and they allow Retrospect through. I even temporarily disabled the firewall, and still the same errors.

I run a backup every week, and I keep a few years backups. Until now, every December I would transfer the snapshots from the past 3 years, and use that as the base for the coming year, thereby discarding the 4th year. Next year I'll have built up 4 years again, and will discard the oldest year. Also, I'd only keep one snapshot from every month for the first 2 of those years. It would take a day or so to transfer all the 400 or so snapshots to create the new base.
"Transfer Snapshots" is now essentially broken in v9.0 and 9.5. I started the usual transfer, and instead of a day to transfer all 400 odd snapshots, it had only transferred about 3 after 4 days!!! At this rate, it won't finish the transfer in a year!!! Retrospect Support acknowledged the problem - still not fixed despite the upgrade from 9.0 to 9.5 - and suggested I use "Transfer Backups" instead, but I can't see how to transfer a backup and drop the old snapshots.
"Forgetting"/"Grooming" snapshots takes ages because Retrospect developers after 4 or 5 major versions STILL have not made it possible to perform multiple selections in the backup-set properties "snapshots" window, so you have to go one by one and it takes ages. I'd just like to select several at one time, select "Forget", and have Retrospect do its work. Quite simple to implement, really, just enable multiple select and then process them in a loop.
Using a selector with "backed up before 1-1-2012" doesn't work either, because that would eliminate files that are still on my system, unchanged since 2011 (and hence only backed-up once).
So how do I get rid of the 65 snapshots from 2011 plus all the weekly snapshots, leaving only the monthly snapshots? Any suggestions?